


If I couldn't sleep could you (A "Til I Feel All Your Pieces" Remix)

by gretazreta (Greta)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, kamikazeremix 2008
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-08-26
Updated: 2008-08-26
Packaged: 2017-10-12 10:04:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/123714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Greta/pseuds/gretazreta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shortly after John's death, Sam and Dean head to Mexico for the Day of the Dead. A remix of "Til I Feel All Your Pieces" by technosage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If I couldn't sleep could you (A "Til I Feel All Your Pieces" Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Til I Feel All Your Pieces](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/1588) by technosage. 



If I Couldn't Sleep Could You

In Ajijic, the dead walk the streets, and no one seems to mind. Dean feels oddly at home among the walking corpses. People leave _offrendes_ on every corner, tortillas and colored candles and candies shaped like grinning skulls, left in little bowls as if the grey-faced ghosts are likely to scoop up a handful at any moment, toss them one by one into the dark caverns of their mouths. They don't. They're cast into silhouette by the fireworks; they watch the dancers with a kind of bemused tolerance.

It's _Dia de los Muertos_ \- the Day of the Dead. The air is smoky with the cloying stench of too many flowers, gently decaying in the sun. Cloves and cheap musk incense. The faded tang of burnt out candles. Dog shit. Perfume. Sweat.

Some villagers carry a glass coffin over the dirt tracks, the procession both macabre and joyous, dancing and weeping. The dead look on from the side of the road, rank upon rank, dusty and silent, eyes shadowed.

No one else sees them, or at the very least the villagers pay no attention. Maybe they're just accustomed. Dean's supposed to be dead: twice now someone else has died because of him. Maybe he's just one of them.

Back in the States, the dead are angry and broken-hearted, severed untimely from everything important as the living press on with the urgency of their own lives. In Mexico, death is everywhere, clasped close to the breast of every man, woman and child. The dead are celebrated, music played for them, gifts left.

Sam watches him constantly, little glances out of the corner of his eye, as if Dean's going to disappear any second, or break apart. Sam doesn't ask him what he's looking at, or what he's looking for.

After the first day, Dean trains himself to stop looking for his father amongst the ghosts. John Winchester is more than dead. He's gone.

**

Deep under the earth, a man holds a gun to Dean's head. It's a Ladysmith and Dean's inclined to mock the dude for carrying a girl's gun. Contrary to what Sam says, Dean sometimes knows when to shut up.

"We're talking about millions of dollars," the guy says. "I've invested everything I own. You can't do this. You can't do this to me." His eyes flicker from side to side, never resting on Dean's face, and no matter that he doesn't want to believe it, he obviously knows it's not Dean that's the problem.

The sinkhole is filled with bones, tessellated skeletons of children and adults, a mass grave that's testament to desperation in times of war and famine. The Mayans sacrificed their children, their loved ones, certain that the ends would justify the means, that the good of the many would outweigh the loss of the few.

The warriors line the walls of the makeshift tomb, chanting so loudly that even the man in front of him can hear.

Dean understands sacrifice, the selfish, desperate substitution of one thing for another, _one life for another_. He understands the worthlessness of it, the futility: one thing isn't another and it never fits right. It's never worth it. Sacrifice never placates powers that revel in death. They're always hungry, insatiable, thinking on the next meal even as they swallow the first.

The blank-faced man in front of him won't ever have the chance to understand that. Dean raises his hands up, and tries again to get through to him.

 

"You want to bulldoze the graves of their kids. Put in some country club with polo fields and infinity pools. You think they're going to let you do that? After what they did? After what they gave up?"

The chanting grows louder. He can see recognition in the developer's eyes, the sweat springing on his forehead at the realisation that everything Dean has been trying to tell him is true.

Dean feels no satisfaction, no pity, only the weary numbness he's been carrying around since he held a lit match to a pile of sticks and burned his father's body.

The chanting is insanity, the veil impossibly thin, the voices of the dead insistent and demanding.

The developer whirls on Dean, eyes bright in the flickering torchlight, a clear line of white showing around the darkness of his irises. He's accusing.

"Why aren't you afraid of them? Why aren't you afraid of me?"

Dean allows himself the luxury of one last, taut, mirthless grin.

"Go ahead and shoot me," he says, wishing that the dude would just do it, find the merciful end of this whole business for them both. "I'm dead, already."

He shuts his eyes at the click of the safety, then forces them open again. This has been a long time coming and he's ready to face it head-on this time.

He's not ready for how it goes down, though, the strangled despairing cry, the gun turning, the endless slow-motion obscenity of barrel between lips, and the muffled pop, crimson splash on ochre walls, so much blood, and the jubilant chorus of the spirits dying away to a satisfied hum.

Sam finds him, a few minutes later, the dead man cradled in his lap, just another one that he couldn't save, another one dead instead of him, because of him. Sam grips his shoulders, checking him over, hands everywhere to ascertain whether any of the blood is Dean's.

Dean tilts his head out of Sam's grip, and fumbles towards insouciance. He's caught between wanting to say "Took your time" and "You should know by now you can't get rid of me that easily" but all he can manage is, "Sam."

Sam kisses him on the mouth, and Dean lets him.

**

Dean's dreams are tangled and overgrown, and he wakes thirsty and heavy-headed. Sam's not there, and the shadows have lengthened into night.

Outside, the paved courtyard is still warm with the heat of the day, rough on his bare feet, but the air is cooler. The dead are still there, but less distinct to his eyes. They're fading. The festival is nearly over. Dean's glad.

He spots Sam almost instantly, and the sight tears a cry of despair right out of him.  
The Impala is an altar, and Sam's kneeling before her, head rested against the chrome grill.

Sam never does anything by halves. There's votive candles mounted above each headlight, some trailing pieces of fabric knotted into patterns, a bowl of food, Mexican beer, and a string of paper skeletons strung between the windscreen wipers.

 _Offrendes_ , and Sam's mourning his dead. Mourning Dean.  
Not like this. Jesus.

Rage is a bright knife that cuts right through him.

The Impala is _his_. She's the only constant in his life, one of two things his father ever really trusted him with.

Dean hasn't looked after Sam, not how he should have, not how his father intended. He fails John Winchester over and over again, every time Sam shifts in his sleep and Dean's body betrays him, every time Sam looks at him with that slanting cat-like gaze and Dean can't resist reaching out and touching.

The Impala is different. Dean's patched her up from scrap, fragment by broken fragment, saved her and made her whole. She's the one last part of him that isn't Sam's to break.

The offrendes make a dull crash as they fall to the ground, the votives spilling a trail of wax across his skin that burns then cools then tightens. He tears the paper cut-outs from the windshield and rips them into shreds. He drops the tamales to the dirt. There's a hum in his ears almost as loud as Sam yelling at him to stop.

Sam grabs him round the middle, drags him from the car, and it's a strange nostalgic kind of reversal of all the times when he was big and Sam was small and he carried Sam with him whenever he was too tired to walk. It shouldn't be so easy for Sam to lift him, to hold him from the decimated altar, to still his kicks, calm his anger.

"I'm not dead," Dean spits out. "I'm not fucking dead. She's mine.

Sam's breath is warm against his neck. "You're not dead," he says. "But you're acting like you are. Two reapers came for you and you're still alive. I wanted… to celebrate that. I wanted _you_ to be able to celebrate that."

Dean gives one last, defeated wriggle, and slumps back into Sam's embrace. Sam's arms tighten around him.

Even now, Sam's strength at his back is a promise of more. The fading eyes of the dead watch impassively as he turns in his brother's embrace and presses against him. There's no judgement, but Dean imagines from somewhere among them, John Winchester watches him, watches the wreck of a life that he saved. Maybe wherever they're keeping him, they show Dean to him again and again, wide-screen and high-def, mocking his sacrifice, because hell will have Dean in the end, and Sam because of what Dean's done, all their immortal souls lost in a spiral that stretches back to a restless summer's night long ago in Indiana and the first tentative movement on lip on lip.

"He shouldn't have done it," Dean whispers, looking down at the ruins of Sam's celebration. "He wouldn't have done it, if he'd known. About us."

Sam's quiet, and Dean can't read him. He knows everything about Sam, and nothing. He knows how Sam looks when he's just tracked down the facts that will blow a case wide open. He knows how Sam looks when he's remembering Jess. He knows how Sam looks when he's tired, cold, grumpy. He knows how Sam likes his coffee, how Sam likes his eggs. He knows that Sam, for some unknown reason, always chooses "rock."

He knows the plane of Sam's neck, if kissed, will make him tremble, defenceless and open and needy. He knows the look on Sam's face when he comes, always faintly bemused at the goodness of it. He knows the weight of Sam's dick in his mouth, the feel of Sam's fingers knotted against his scalp.

He doesn't know what Sam dreams of, when he wakes shrieking. He doesn't know what Sam did during the years at Stanford that they don't talk about. He doesn't know the songs Sam hums under his breath.

He doesn't know what Sam thinks of him. Whether Sam blames Dean, the way he blames himself, for his complete inability to do the right thing.

"I don't care," Sam murmurs, almost silently. "I'm glad. For both parts of it. If I could have chosen, I would have done the same thing."

Dean wants to howl. It's not the answer he needs. Instead he rests his forehead against Sam's chest and holds on tight.

**  
It turns out that the paper bag by the driver's side tire holds a bottle of Jose Cuervo. They sit inside, side by side on the faded couch. Sam eats the rescued tamales and drinks beer, and Dean makes his way steadily through shot after shot.

Tequila turns everything around, and maybe that's part of the point. He tries to stay angry with Sam for crossing yet another boundary without looking back, but by the time a third of the bottle has disappeared he's just angry with himself.

Tequila tastes like dying, numbness spread over his tongue and down his throat, bringing slow blur of sound into the soft droning hum of his own heartbeat. It has the warm consistency of blood in his mouth. It turns the air into honey and regret into wanting: he's drowning in both.

Sam moves in slow motion and slumps beside him, so they're aligned through thigh and shoulder. Sam's warmth warms him. He can feel Sam's pulse in his chest, or maybe it's his own. There's really no difference.

He should give Sam up, but he doesn't know how, he's never known.  
Instead, Dean leans into Sam, noses a path from collar to jaw, breathing Sam's smell, sweat and beer and salt and brother. He kisses the angle of Sam's chin, licks the corner of his mouth, bites at his lip, savors Sam's shiver and inaudible moan.

Dean drinks again, straight from the bottle, and moves to straddle Sam's legs, concentrating on unbuttoning, following his own whimsy across collarbone and nipple and the indentation of Sam's navel.

He sips tequila from Sam's belly, toasts life with each touch of mouth to skin. He tastes his own death mixed with the salt of his brother's life, until there's no separation: there never was.

There's not one inch of this body he doesn't know, more precious than his own. Dean's heard that when you die that your life flashes before your eyes. In Dean's endless time of dying, his life was Sam's life, not one memory without him in it. Even the four years apart Dean remembered only as a series of attempts to forget.

He licks a line up Sam's cock, tastes the sharpbitter of him, takes him in deep in his mouth. Worships him, steals the climax right out of him.

He's the only thing Dean has every really wanted.

When Dean presses inside Sam's arching body, it still feels like violation. It's a breach of trust. It's wrong. It's unbearably right. It's wrong.

He has to stop. He can't stop.

He has to _stop_.

Sam's heels hook around his back, trap him there, caught in his own sin. Sam's eyes are dark, and a little desperate; Sam's hands on his jaw holding him in place so he can't look away.

"I want this," Sam says fiercely, desperately. "I want _you_."

"You've got me," Dean whispers. "As long as you want."

That's the truth of it. It's always been the truth of it, since their first time, since before their first time, since the first time Dean looked into his brother's curious eyes, since the first time Sammy spoke his name.

The truth is that in this moment, Dean is both rapist and vigilante, murderer and savior; the grip of Sam's body at once punishment and sanctification, again and again and again. In this moment, he's Sam's hated beloved, he's dead and alive, his guilt and redemption caught in the helix of Sam's body twisted around his.

The truth is that given the chance, he will do the same for Sam as his father did for him, without even thinking about it. Sam's everything. Sam's his brother, his blessing, his eternal damnation. Dean will never love anyone more.

Sam's so beautiful. Why does he have to be so beautiful?

Sam grips him, hard, legs and arms chaining Dean to him. Dean can't breathe. He can't escape. He can't even look away from Sam's face, from the understanding he sees there, the fear and forgiveness and love, everything between them spilled open for him to see.

"You almost _died_ ," Sam whispers. "You almost _left_ me."

He's never really realised that this might cut both ways.

His only answer is to kiss Sam, to take his breath, to draw him closer, to hold him and to not let go.

This, then, is being alive: complexity and intensity; pleasure and pain; Sam. Dean's orgasm, when it comes, is nothing like death, nothing like that sweet slow unravelling. It's sharp and vivid and glorious: it burns him to nothing and brings him back to life.

**

When Dean wakes up, the dead are gone. It's just him and Sam, wrapped together, Sam's face close to his, smudged with dried tears.

Dean licks his thumb and wipes the tears away.

**  
the end  
**


End file.
